After a lot of new deals within the smartphone industry, Reliance Jio is now foraying into the smart meter business. According to the sources of the Mint, Jio is looking to provide meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services to electricity distribution companies.
What is a Smart Meter?
Smart Meters use a secure national communication network to send the actual or real energy usage of your household wirelessly and securely. With Smart Meters, you don’t have to be dependent on providing the meter readings every month or wait for estimated energy bills.
By using a smart meter, you also get to save a lot of money, reducing the chances of Electricity theft drastically and many other advantages.
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Jio’s Rumored Plans to enter the business
According to the reports, Jio’s smart meter plans will come as a part of world’s largest electricity smart metering programme underway in India, with the aim of cutting distribution losses and which seeks to replace 250 million conventional meters to cut the debt of the industry and raise the annual revenues of the discoms to Rs 1.38 trillion, as per the Mint.
RIL is planning to offer these services to the consumers through Narrow Band – Internet of things (NB-IoT).
“Some of the services that RIL may offer include meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services,” said one of the people close to the development, to the Mint.
Discoms are currently the weakest link in the electricity value chain in India, which are affected by low collection, inadequate tariff hikes, increase in power purchase cost, and subsidy disbursement, and continuous increase in dues by the government departments. Jio plans to solve these problems as the Smart Meters will help reduce these issues.